Nobel Women’s Initiative: The Peacemakers

Only a dozen women have received the Nobel Peace Prize in its 107-year history. And on one afternoon in 2004, three of them met in Nairobi, Kenya, for a so-called Nobel Ladies’ Tea.

But those women—Kenyan environmental leader Wangari Maathai, Ph.D.; Iranian human rights advocate Shirin Ebadi, Ph.D.; and American anti-landmine activist Jody Williams—shared much more than conversation over crumpets that day. They concocted a world-changing plan: to bring all living female Peace Prize laureates together to empower women around the globe to fight violence, inequality and injustice. It would be the first time that any Peace Prize recipients had joined forces this way. “And lo and behold, who is it?” says Jody Williams. “It’s the girls.”

Today the Nobel Women’s Initiative (NWI) also includes Irish peace activists Mairead Corrigan Maguire and Betty Williams, and Guatemala’s famed indigenous-rights worker Rigoberta Menchu Tum— all told, six of the seven living female Peace Prize winners. (The seventh is their would-be colleague Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy activist, who at press time remains under house arrest in Burma.)

A primary goal of the Initiative is to get international leaders to listen to—and learn from—women. This year has been the NWI’s most productive yet. In May the laureates strongly lobbied for a historic international treaty banning cluster bombs, which is set to pass this month. This summer, on a special fact-finding mission to the Thailand-Burma border, South Sudan and the Chad-Darfur area, the NWI met with activists and officials, clinic workers and refugees themselves to investigate the status of women and find out firsthand what it’s going to take to finally achieve peace in those places. “Women are suffering while their male leaders are so busy fighting over resources and power,” says Maathai of what she saw. “We have no option but to work [together] for peace.”

After the trip, the NWI took immediate action, distributing a no-holds-barred report about what they’d learned, and pushing the U.N. to back the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Sudan’s president for genocide.

“Consensus politics is natural to women,” says Maguire. “They do it every day in their homes and communities. On a global scale…women can help create a culture of dialogue and negotiation.” Adds Menchu: “Women are the guarantee of harmony.”

And the Nobel men are starting to agree. As fellow laureate Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu puts it, “women ought to be saying to men, ‘Look at the mess you’ve made—get out of the way.’ And with the moral authority bestowed on them by the Nobel, whatever they say or do, the world sits up and takes notice.”

But the women of the NWI insist that all women, with or without Nobel credentials, can make a difference. “The first step toward waging peace around the world is to refrain from doing to others what we don’t want done to us, and to wish what we like for ourselves for others,” says Ebadi. “Everyone can do this.”

It’s with that can-do attitude that the NWI relentlessly pushes for the release of political prisoners in Burma—including one of their own, Aung San Suu Kyi, who for 13 of the past 19 years has been under house arrest. During that time she was separated from her husband in the final years of his life and missed his funeral. She has rarely laid eyes on her two sons as they’ve grown to adulthood. “We believe one day our sister laureate will be free, and we continue to work to gain her freedom,” says Betty Williams. “When that day comes, she will take her rightful place beside us.”